Will Steve Bannon face jail time over contempt of the Capitol riot inquiry?

A US congressional committee investigating the Capitol riot has voted unanimously in favour of holding former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.

Bannon, who led the former president’s election campaign in 2016, “refused to comply with a subpoena” relating to the inquiry into the 6 January insurrection, The Telegraph said, prompting the committee to approve a prosecution in a 9-0 vote.

The vote will now pass to Congress and if approved will be “referred to the justice department, which has the final say on bringing charges”, the BBC added.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

‘Substantial advance knowledge’

In her opening remarks, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the committee, said Bannon appeared to have “substantial advance knowledge of the plans” for the protest, and of Trump’s plans to discredit the presidential election result.

“Mr Bannon was in the war room at the Willard on January 6th”, she said, adding that there was evidence that he also had “detailed knowledge” of Trump’s “efforts to sell millions of Americans the fraud that the election was stolen”.

The cross-party congressional committee’s 26-page report stated that Bannon, who had been fired from Trump’s White House at the time of the violence on Capitol Hill, had made statements prior to the rioting that suggested he knew in advance about the “extreme events”.

It cited comments made on his podcast, War Room: Impeachment, on 5 January, when Bannon warned: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”

The next day, “thousands of Trump supporters descended on the Capitol and clashed with the police”, The Independent said. Five people were killed, including Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, and hundreds more injured.

“In the words of many who participated in the January 6th attack, the violence that day was in direct response to President Trump’s repeated claims – from election night through January 6th – that he had won the election,” Cheney said.

Bannon’s refusal to comply with the committee’s subpoena left lawmakers with “no choice but to seek consequences”, she added.

The former presidential aide’s lawyers have argued “that he will not cooperate with the committee until Trump's executive privilege claim is resolved by a court or through a settlement agreement”, The Telegraph said.

Trump has “urged former aides subpoenaed by the panel to reject its requests” citing executive privilege, the paper added. Earlier this week he submitted a legal challenge “alleging that the committee made an illegal, unfounded and overly broad request for his White House records”.

Joe Biden’s administration has stated that “Trump has no legitimate privilege claim”, the BBC said.

The president last week told reporters that he hopes the committee “goes after” those found responsible for the riot and “holds them accountable”.

Asked whether he would support prosecutions, he replied: “I do, yes.”

Privileged defence

The dispute over Bannon’s refusal to testify in front of the committee comes down to executive privilege, a legal principle that protects many White House communications.

In the committee’s report, lawmakers “reiterated” that Bannon’s claim that his involvement is covered by the defence “did not apply in his case”, also citing “a series of exchanges with Bannon's attorney, Robert Costello, warning that the former Trump strategist was in ‘defiance’ of his subpoena”, NPR said.

As Bannon had been fired from the White House at the time of the riot, the report also argued that his “case especially does not apply since he was a private citizen as of 6 January and not part of the Trump administration”, the broadcaster added.

“It’s a shame that Mr Bannon has put us in this position,” Democrat Bennie Thompson, the panel's chairman, said. “But we won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

“Mr Bannon will comply with our investigation or he will face the consequences. We cannot allow anyone to stand in the way of the select committee as we work to get to the facts. The stakes are too high,” he added.

Some Democratic lawmakers have suggested that Bannon is “stalling to push back proceedings until after the midterm elections in November 2022”, the BBC said. The former Breitbart executive may be hoping the elections “alter the balance of power in the House”, providing him with more Republican cover.

“Contempt of Congress cases are notoriously difficult to litigate”, the broadcaster added. “The last time such a prosecution took place was in 1983 against a Reagan administration official”.

Whether Trump will attempt to defend his former right-hand man remains to be seen as the “rift” between the pair has only “widened” since Bannon left the administration, The Times said.

In 2018, the president was quoted as saying: “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Bannon, however, appears undeterred by the legal threat, summoning “scores of former Trump political appointees” to a Republican social club earlier this month to discuss “how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government”, NBC reported.

In a telephone interview with the broadcaster, Bannon said: “If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately.”

Describing his speech to the assembled GOP figures, he added: “I gave them fire and brimstone.”